Now we're all counting the real cost of Ken

Thursday 3 April 2008 08:34 BST

Cash well spent? Ken Livingstone's many claims about job creation, air pollution and recycling are open to question

Among the litany of hopeless defences deployed by the Mayor during the Lee Jasper affair, I especially enjoyed the one where he claimed that the large amounts of London Development Agency money mislaid by Jasper's cronies represented only "0.0001 per cent" of the LDA's annual budget.

If I got caught shoplifting then protested that my haul was only "0.0001 per cent" of Tesco's turnover that day, I somehow doubt it would impress the judge. But let's, purely for argument's sake, accept that single millions don't matter in that happy soda-fountain of dosh that is the GLA budget. The problem is that there are serious doubts about the hundreds of millions, too.

To stay with the LDA, for the moment. It calls itself "the Mayor's agency for business and jobs". It has spent a total of £2.6 billion since 2000. But just how many actual new jobs has it delivered for that vast sum? The Mayor doesn't seem to know. On 30 January 2007, he told the London Assembly member Andrew Pelling that over its first six years of existence, the LDA had "created or safeguarded" 90,800 jobs.

But by 12 December 2007, with only one more year's figures added in, Mr Livingstone was telling another Assembly member, Richard Barnes, that the LDA had "created or safeguarded" 156,000 new jobs. Either the LDA had a quite spectacular jobcreation blitz during 2007, or the figures are phony. I regret that it's more likely to be the latter.

For a start, the numbers include not just new jobs, but that weasel word, jobs "safeguarded". It turns out, for instance, that the LDA counts every existing job in every existing business evicted from the Olympic site as a job "safeguarded" - because it forced, sorry "helped", them to move. No matter that some businesses in fact left London or collapsed, taking all their jobs with them, as a result of the evictions.

When you take out the so-called safeguarded jobs, the LDA now claims to have created 83,599 totally new jobs since 2000. At more than £31,000 a job, that seems rather expensive. But look at the breakdown by employment sector and the alarm bells ring even louder.

The creative industries (film, TV, design, web and so on) are a major LDA priority area and account for about one fifth of all new jobs in London. But they make up only one eightieth of the new jobs created by the LDA. Tourism is another growth industry and another LDA priority (it runs Visit London, the London tourist board). But only 120 of the LDA's supposed 83,000 new jobs were created in tourism.

In fact, fully 71,000 of the 83,000 new jobs allegedly created thanks to the LDA are not allocated to any specific employment sector at all. Perhaps I'm just being too cynical but I do wonder whether all those 71,000 new jobs actually exist.

We might say: who cares? London's economy has enjoyed a 15-year boom. It's created real new jobs all by itself - 550,000 in financial services alone - and doesn't need an effective LDA. But it does. Huge numbers of Londoners have been entirely untouched by the gold rush. Incredibly, London has the highest unemployment in Britain. Half of all inner-London children live in poverty. Literally within sight of the City, Europe's greatest concentration of wealth, the East End has the most unskilled, economically-stagnant workforce in the UK.

The LDA's own publication, Economic Development Snapshot, makes clear the agency's utter failure to address this scandal. The latest issue, in January, describes its performance in reducing barriers to employment as "poor" and says: "There has been little, if any, increase in London's employment rate over the economic cycle to date ... the employment rates of the most disadvantaged groups do not appear to have improved significantly relative to the overall rate."

The same pattern of heavy spending - not matched by heavy, or sometimes any, achievement - is repeated across the London board, in both Kenworld and territories beyond. Metronet and Tube Lines (not Ken's fault) have spent approaching £7 billion so far and made no difference whatever to the Underground.

Sacks of money and hours of political rhetoric have been devoted by the Mayor to the environment and climate change. But London's C02 emissions have actually risen since 2003, while the UK's overall have been flat. Air quality in London has fallen on Ken's watch.

Household waste has grown faster in London than the provinces and recycling (a borough matter) has lagged behind.

Hundreds of millions of pounds have gone to fund so-called "affordable" housing. The absolute number of new affordable homes built each year has risen, in line with the growth in housebuilding generally.

But the Mayor's endlessly-hyped target that 50 per cent of new homes should be affordable has in fact made no difference whatever to the proportion of affordable homes built. It was 34 per cent in 2000/01, his first year in office, and it is 34 per cent now.

Simon Fletcher, Mr Livingstone's chief of staff, is said to believe that public concern about the "cost of Ken" is one of the chief barriers to the Mayor's re-election. Perhaps that should really be the cost of New Labour.

Until recently, Labour's excess has been tolerated by voters. The country is prosperous, the tax revenues are flowing in. Britain can afford the luxury of public waste. But now, as purse-strings get tighter, people will be less relaxed.

If Boris Johnson wins next month, he will face a huge challenge to deliver real value for money. Hearing him speaking about keeping many of the current mayoral team in place, I'm not sure he yet appreciates the scale of that challenge. Boris's key need is to explain a little more just how he intends to go about things differently. There are disturbing signs that he accepts some of the Livingstonian any-public-spendingis-good template.

When I imagine what the LDA, City Hall and Government could have done with London's unprecedented decade of wealth and bursting public coffers, and when I tot up what they actually did do with it, I feel angry. Only a real clear-out can get the machine in effective working order again.